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England Upturn'd
Characters Maps Equipment Sessions Session 1 Being begunne eventide of Friday the 2nd of May in the year of our Lord 1642, in the Royalist stronghold of King's Lynn, Norfolk Characters * Bastard (Nathan) * Boomer (Alex) * Drudger (James) * Flint (Ben) Events * Flint and Bastard meet and befriend a beggar, Boomer, and an angler, Drudger, outside the inn in Kings Lynn. * Boomer, Drudger, Flint and Bastard decide to travel at night, and consider robbing a farm. Instead they opt to steal the wooden crucifix from a window; which Flint decides to hurl into the farmland. * Boomer, Drudger, Bastard and Flint stayed at the alms house in Gedney, contemplated robbing/raping a priest (and/or his wife), and then travelled on to Whaplode. * Drudger bought a round of drinks to ingratiate themselves to the locals in Whaplode. * Flint took exception to the locals and spat in their pints, they took exception to that and threw a pint in Flints face. * After an awkward stand off, Flint bottled it and instead opted to bide their time for “revenge” * Drudger, Boomer, Bastard and Flint then waited until the local owners had left. To pass the time Bastard met a doctor outside, and decided to claim he, too, was a doctor. * Boomer, Drudger and Bastard distracted the bar staff while Flint looted the upstairs, and defaced family pictures and left a present of bodily fluids in a chest, tucked away upstairs. Flint managed to accrue a small amount of loot from the chest, including a rather fancy knife. * When the local owners left, Boomer, Drudger, Bastard and Flint set fire to the stable - attached to the tavern. * Making loud announcements about “Heading east” they set off to the west, towards Spaulding. * They were chased down on the road, and after a brief brawl Boomer was shot by one of the locals, Bastard was cut down by one with a sword, Flint and Drudger considered staying hidden but instead opted for death or glory, and were met with death. * Their story ends with gun smoke and blade clashes on the road to Spaulding Session 2 Being begunne morningtide of Saturday the 10th of May in the year of our Lord 1642, in the disputed territory of Spaulding. Characters * Gideon Roach (Alex) * Jack Adams (Ben) * Clive (James) Events The Itinerant Catholic * Gideon, Jack and Clive decide to leave Spaulding in search of opportunities to better themselves, but strictly in the financial sense and as long as it involves no personal improvement. * They head to Pinchbeck, where there is an ongoing swampland reclamation project, primarily funded by Lord xx - this is not entirely popular among the locals, who liked having commonly usable property rather more than they liked having more profitable land which they can no longer access. * After dallying for a while to discuss the ethics of the Inclosure Acts and whether to set fire to the fences at night, they head on to Surfleet - spotting an empty gibbet by the crossroads on the way. * Once in Surfleet they meet a roaming Catholic priest. Clive is perhaps not the most tactful with the accursed idolater, which combined with his utterly uncharismatic demeanour and the fact that the band are clearly unscrupulous mercenary types means that the priest declines their offer of an escort back to Pinchbeck. He says that he fears that once they leave town the party will turn on him. Which is a good shout, to be fair, that was absolutely the plan. * Instead, the party trails him at a slight distance until they get to the crossroads between Surfleet and Pinchbeck, where they surround him, gag him with strips of his own robe, force him to give up his solid gold crucifix, put him in the gibbet, take him back out of the gibbet, tie his hands, put him back in the gibbet and then tie it closed with the horse reined to it. * The party then high tail it back through Surfleet and on to Algakirk. The Algakirk Exhumations * Upon arriving in Algakirk they find a burned out house - and discover that the famous European witch-finder Niklas Brahe has passed through and found that Old Man Wilkes was a witch through means of application of the scientific method - for example, milk placed near the old man became sour! (Why this is different from the ongoing sour milk problem is not quite specified). * The crowd suspects that this pronouncement may be something to do with the house then mysteriously burning down with Old Man Wilkes inside. They are pleased to say that their milk will probably become good and their crops stop failing any day now - although this hasn't quite happened yet. * Brahe has since moved on to Fossdyke - the rumours are that one of the Smeatons may be a witch! * The party, and especially grifter-in-chief concerned citizen Jack, are distressed to find that the locals have foolishly buried the body on consecrated ground. Offering to relocate the body to outside of the village, the party are pointed at the local priest. * Jack makes a compelling, if not entirely honest, case to the priest - and is alarmed to find that there is not one, but five of these heathens buried on church grounds! Do they not know that this will attract more witches? This is probably why their repeated habit of killing suspected witches has not yet solved their bad milk problem. * After some negotiation, the priest agrees to pay the party 150 silver pieces to relocate these bodies and marks the gravestones of said heretics (paying 50 silver up front). * The party sets to with great aplomb, working from early afternoon until well after dark, only stopping to book a room at a nearby inn. As they do so, they formulate all sorts of plans for saving effort. However, it quickly becomes clear that the priest will notice that something is amiss if they aren't seen to actually relocate the bodies - Gideon in particular had been fond of the idea of dumping them all into one of the graves. * The dig is slightly spiced up when one of the bodies bursts out of the coffin as Jack and Clive, standing in the grave, heft it up towards Gideon. This gnarled and claw-handed fiend probably intends to attack. I don't know, they drop the coffin and repeatedly shoot it in the head instead. * The priest rushes out, a few minutes later, looking rather flustered - and is even more flustered when he sees that the party have been set upon by this dead witch. The party turn this into a swift extra 50 silver as danger pay, and further retroactive justification for the whole corpse relocation grift. * The party finally finish around midnight, with five coffins full of witch (one with a couple of fresh holes in, leaking a bit of head-juice) to relocate. Gideon loads one into a wheelbarrow, and Clive and Jack drag the other two with ropes. * Realising that they need to at least move the bodies out of the village at this point, the party sets out east across the Fens. Looking for a good place to dump them, they trek slowly out East until they reach swampy ground. * In the interests of not getting caught, it seems better to at least make a shallow pit to dump the bodies in. * In the interests of the coffins not being found, it seems better to make the pits a bit deeper, larger, and more grave-like to fit the coffins in. * The party "dumps" the bodies and congratulates themselves on a con well done, not realising that they have actually just done everything they promised and that it probably doesn't count as a con in that case. * This was, in fact, dangerously close to A Job. * The party are exhausted after a long day of manual labour, miles of walking (in some cases lugging corpses along), and a morning robbery, so head back to The Swan to turn in for the night. To the Witchhunter * In the morning, the party attends the Sunday church service and collects the remaining reward, as well as being loudly praised by the priest. Jack takes advantage of this with an impromptu additional collection at the door. The locals are very vociferously grateful, but so poor that they are unable to scrape together more than eight additional copper to put in Jack's hat. * The party decides to rest up through the rest of Sunday and all of Monday, recovering from the trauma of actually doing a day's work, and finally leave on Tuesday to head to Fosdyke, either to see this Brahe fellow in person or to profit from the corpses left in his wake. * As they approach Fosdyke, they come across the Smeaton manor - knocking on the door they are met with a man clearly about to leave the house. After some probing which is tactless, but not enough to get them shot if this is indeed Brahe, they discover that they are instead talking to John Smeaton, landowner, and brother of both the accused witch Andrew Smeaton and the local vicar Philip Smeaton. * The party accompanies John to the All Saints Church, where the daily local service is taking place - with much disruption from prolific witch-hunter, but even more prolific heckler, Niklas Brahe. The party engages him in brief conversation, but he is much more interested in making a scene. * As the service finishes, Brahe makes a dramatic exit, promising that he won't leave until he has found out what is in "that tower" * Spotting an opportunity to make a quick buck protect the innocent, the party approaches the Smeatons and asks what they would be willing to part if Brahe could be "convinced to move on" * A little negotiation results in a promised price of 15 gold, to be paid once Brahe is no longer vexing the Smeatons. * The family mentions that they won't let Brahe into the tower because they refuse to be bullied. * The only other information which the party is able to confirm is that Brahe comes to every service (there are several each day) - but they have found out that he MIGHT be staying at a local farm outside town. Plans to track and possibly ambush him are currently forming in the party members' minds. Session 3 Being begunne morningtide of Tuesday the 13th of May in the year of our Lord 1642, in the unremarkable hamlet of Fosdyke. * After church, the gang head to the Pullet's Alehouse to... reconnoitre with a morning beer. The bar maid seems unconvinced by the Smeaton rumour, but old man Eric believes that the accusation may be true; the last time a witch was burnt in the area she was their mother, way back when Eric were a lad. As Andrew is an alchemist, suspicion is only natural. * Gideon was reprimanded by the otherwise timid barmaid for asking for something stronger at this time of the morning. "Our Lord teaches temperance" * Eric confirms that Brahe will be earning his keep at the Middlecot farm.